1. Technical Field
The invention relates to the field of telephony, and, more particularly, to utilizing load balancing resources within a telephony environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
Presently, when implementing a telephony environment, a system developer must select a particular telephony communications environment. Once selected, the system developer is constrained to work within that telephony environment. That is, a system developer choosing to build a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) based telephony solution implements the entire design within the context of SIP. Similarly, a telephony solution which relies upon H.323 will be implemented within the context of H.323. The system designer can select the telephony environment which best suits the overall needs of an organization.
Still, constraining a telephony solution to a single communications environment can have unavoidable consequences. As is often the case, although the selected telephony environment provides significant benefits with respect to the overall needs of the organization, inevitably, the selected telephony environment also will have deficiencies with respect to smaller, more specific organizational needs or implementation details.
For example, while the telephony environment can provide for most needs of the organization, the system designer must select only those components which are compatible with the selected telephony environment and protocol. In consequence, the system designer often cannot select “best of breed” components when constructing the telephony system. In other words, particular components which may be preferred by the system designer may not be available or compatible with the telephony environment selected for the organization. Accordingly, the system designer can be forced to sacrifice preferred components in favor of designing an overall system which generally accommodates most needs of the organization. In other cases, to incorporate a preferred component within a system design, the system designer may be forced to implement a custom programmed interface. This can add significant time and expense when implementing the telephony system.